Late capitalist networked culture is obsessed with improving performance. TED speakers are cult idols, sharing their commandments for success and productivity. On social networks our friends become brands, and brands become our friends. Self-help books are interchangeable with business philosophies. In the conference room – and the weekend supplements – we learn how to shape ourselves, how to be consistent, how to operate. Reduce entropy. Maximise consistency. Become an industry of one.
You are an engine. One day you’ll fly away.
Created by Alan Warburton.
Music by Alan Warburton and Tom Hatfield.
Gates unpicks the technological deterministic fatalism of the expectation that the widespread deployment of biometric technologies is a foregone conclusion. She argues:
There’s also an assumption that in the very near future, these technologies will be capable of automatically identifying us with near-perfect accuracy, free of the messy cultural baggage that muddles the way humans identify one another. Human perception is inherently biased and flawed, according to this logic, while computers are inherently objective, free from error and prejudice.
It follows that, and as Gates goes on to argue, to invent the technology, be the owner of the data upon which it operates and then verify the ‘accuracy’ of that technology (as Facebook do with their facial recognition systems) means that one necessarily invents the accuracy of that technology as well. Likewise, in creating such systems and the parameters in which they (must) operate (to be effective) we necessarily circumscribe and predetermine their uses, and thus also invent their usefulness. Therefore, in this sense, by inventing the technology and its usefulness we invent the future in which it is necessary:
In other words, inventing the accuracy of biometric technologies involves making bigger claims about what they can do than their limited experimental results can support.
Of course, such a process of invention is also, necessarily, a (re)invention of our ‘selves’, in multiple. It is a kind of ontogenetic (and more specifically here, technogenetic process, as Gates highlights – although I prefer Simondon to Hayles on this point). The multiple nature of the data representations of our ‘selves’ convenes the various ways in which we are conceived as entities, in data and in flesh, and thus the multiple ways our identities are performed. We are reinvented by looking back at our-selves through the ‘eyes’ of the technology: the surveillant relation between the unblinking gaze of the technology and our performance of identity is co-constituted.
Understanding ourselves as fully enmeshed with technologies might help us get a better sense of what biometrics portend for our already surveillant culture. We already conceive of ourselves as people with official identities composed of disembodied aggregates of transaction-generated data–digital representations of ourselves that circulate over networks. In fact, it is a necessary precondition of biometric system development that we conceive of ourselves in this way. In short, if computers are getting better at recognizing humans, it’s because humans are getting much better at looking at, and seeing themselves, much like computers.
A helpful way of understanding this is through the brief exposition of the ‘dividual’ Deleuze makes in his Postscript on the Societies of Control: “a physically embodied human […] that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via the modern technologies of control, like computer-based systems” (as Robert Williams has it). If we look at the production and performance of our selves, as ‘dividuals’, we are, I would argue, confronting the necessity to un-think “the subject” (following J-D Dewsbury’s Deleuzian reading of Badiou). We accordingly consume our selves by trusting in the apparatuses of multiple surveillance (Facebook etc.) and are invited to deny what is incalculable.
Stiegler would perhaps argue that to combat our rendering as biometric surveillant subjects we must take care of our selves, of our incalculability; believe in that incalculability, and make that care a basis of our political economic relations. Of course, that is far easier said than done. Biometric technology does not necessitate the rendering of ‘dividuals’, that future is not a forgone conclusion, but it will take a lot of work to invent an alternative.
In the interview, Stiegler argues (as he has elsewhere) that we are increasingly under pressure to ‘synchronise’ – to conform to particular patterns of thought and behaviour–especially consumerism – in the ongoing struggle of capitalism to find ever-more profit. This synchronisation, he says, is led by the ‘programme industries’ – mass media and so on – that want us to mindlessly submit to consumerism and commodification (through systems like Facebook). What is engendered is a form of ‘programming’, as an exercise of ‘psychopower’, which is something like the forms of ‘control’ envisaged by Deleuze (and drawn upon by Stiegler previously).
Stiegler’s answer to this is to identify the need to ‘deprogram’, using techniques of the self (following Foucault). He goes on to provide an example of what he does on holiday–which sounds suspiciously like work to me, but then its all about the otium, the pursuit of knowledge while free from the pressures of subsistence.
This is a fairly quick translation, so please read it as such. As usual clarifications and original French terms are in square brackets. All emphasis follows the original text.
The question of time extends throughout his body of work and through book after book, this philosopher sketches a picture of a society under the growing infleunce of the programme industries. The final stage of capitalism is the control and snychronisation of “available brain time”. This process in which the individual is standardised may cause a depression and violence without precedent, but philosophy can help to establish responses.
PM. What characterises the experience of time today?
B.S. Our era is characterised by synchronisation. The programme industries are attempting to synchronise all of our consciousnesses; a control over the life of the soul through television which establishes a pyschopower characteristic of our times. This process of synchronisation has its roots in the late 18th century, with the mechanical reproduction of the workers’ gestures through automation, in the service of what Michel Foucault described as biopower. Spread by the grand industrial revolution of the 19th century, synchronisation led to what Karl Marx describes as proletarianisation, the worker becomes proletarian. If a worker contributes to the creation of new forms of production, industrialisation makes work a form of slavery and establishes, instead, what Gilbert Simondon calls a loss of individuation for the worker. The movement that is individuation is no longer in the worker, Simondon says, but in the machine that replaces him as a “technical individual“. Wherever you go now, you have the same models of production and distribution. This globalisation comes at the price of a synchronisation of modes of life and thought. Today, this becoming is extended throughout all aspects of life and destroys the singularity of existence through consumerism, which liquidates life skills [savoir-vivre]. Within a decade, with a catastrophic evolution of television, the symbolic itself became an object of consumption and became un-symbolic: we no longer participate in the diachronisation of languages; we parrot Newspeak. The programme industries proletarianised symbolic production, and they destroyed singular and collective time.
PM. In this context, are holidays still possible?
BS. The latin term otium is often translated as “leisure”, it is what the Greeks called skholè, from which we get the work skoleion, which becomes “school”. School is for those who have been released from the obligation of providing for themselves and who can spend free time, without which no real expertise [connaissance véritable] is possible. Otium in Latin and skholè in Greek describe free-time for contemplation, through which we learn to live through a desire for truth: the possibility of reaching a time that is not given to subsistence (the time of slaves and proletarians), but which also is not given to existence (the time of the agora, of political debate). However, to establish lives [des existences], we must reach for what exceeds them and what I live to call consistencies [les consistances] – which the Greeks called idealities.
In this context, holidays must become an otium for the people. During a holiday, and holidays are a special case, we primarily try to deprogram – and to rediscover the consistency in our existence [la consistance dans son existence], for example through a change of scenery. However, human life is always programmed [programmée]. There are cosmic programmes, vital programmes, and socio-ethnic and symbolic programmes. These programmes are a condition of the social. But, these programmes can and should be reprogrammed, or suspended. Trigano, Disney and others have understood that this is a huge market, it is accordingly becoming more and more difficult to deprogram.
PM. How do you deprogram yourself?
BS. To deprogram oneself necessitates keeping to very specific schedules, which are what Foucault, once again, described as techniques of the self, echoing Seneca. Holidays are a moment to practice such programmes. Myself, I use relaxation as a form of deprogramming. When I go on holiday, I work early and write all morning. Then, I swim, a lot, until that state when physical exertion stimulates a rush–because the brain produces a lot of endorphins. Swimming thus becomes a journey within oneself, during the course of which I run back through my memory of everything I wrote several hours earlier. Then I lie in the sun, drained, and I let my mind empty, since this is how unlikely thoughts can arise: something un-programmed emerges from all of this. Then I return to writing: I note all that has arisen – first in the water, then in the sun – all through rereading and annotating what I wrote in the morning.
Under the sun, I sense that this mass of hydrogen that has been combusting for several billion years is a cosmic programme that intervenes in my physiological programmes – muscles, brain, various organs – and which, in this intervention, produces a difference, a change of programme which allows me to write another kind of programme: a book in which I comment generally on other books.
Books, when they are good, are thus deprogramming programmes, unlikely programmes, like poems, in which there must be, wrote Paul Claudel, “a number that prevents counting”.
SK–The sense in which ‘programme’ is used here plays on the double meaning of scheduling (of time, performance etc.) and codified instructions (for computers), but both have a sense of the rendering discrete the phenomena being programmed.
Fred Turner (STS Assoc. Prof. at Stanford), author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, has written another book examining the development of theories of what Turner calls ‘the democratic personality’ by Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and others into an alternative form of propaganda to encourage opposition to fascism, described as the Democractic Surround, which serves as the title of the book. Turner describes some of the important themes of the book in conversation with Howard Rheingold (who is, incidentally, one of the people that appears in From Counterculture to Cyberculture). Charting movements between American anthropology (through Mead et al.), European avant grade arts (the Bauhaus refugees) and their subsequent absorption into the American cultural milieu in the form of the Black Mountain College (and so John Cage), Turner skilfully weaves an interesting narrative.
For those interested, there is a review essay by Fred Turner of Peter Mandler’s Return From the Natives, on Public Books, which examines the influence of Boas’ ‘school’ of anthropology on war-time (WWII) propaganda.
You can also see Stanford’s form of ‘propaganda’ in the shape of the promotional video they created for Turner’s book…
Over on the Viralityblog, Tony Sampson highlights this recent and rurally interesting call for papers for a conference concerning technology and resistance. I have reproduced the CFP below but see the original blog for Tony’s take…
Friction:An interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistanceUniversity of Nottingham
Thursday 8th May & Friday 9th May, 2014Keynote talk by Pollyanna Ruiz (LSE)
With workshops led by: Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey; University of Leicester Technology Group; Jen Birks and John Downey; and Rachel Jacobs (Active Ingredient).
Current workshop themes include: evil media; data, digital leaks and political activism; hacklabs and artistic uses of data.
Friction: noun
[mass noun]
The resistance that one surface or object encounters when moving over another:
· the action of one surface or object rubbing against another
· conflict or animosity caused by a clash of wills, temperaments, or opinions
Oxford English Dictionary, 2013
We are now living in a frictionless economy in which money, jobs and products can move around the world in the blink of an eye. And yet we have not moved to a frictionless society. Rather, many of the technologies that support the frictionless economy create various forms of friction in society. Taking a lead from the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Critical Theory’s Technology and Resistance research strand, we are interested in proposals for papers and workshops that explore the concept/metaphor of ‘friction’ as a starting point for exploring the relationship between everyday technologies and resistance; with resistance understood in both a politically empowering and an inhibitory sense. On the one hand, we’re interested in modes of organised resistance: of activist movements making use of, or reacting against, technological developments. However we’re concerned with resistance in a second sense: of technologies resisting their intended function, breaking down, being exploited by hackers or triggering unexpected socio-economic complications.
We invite people to use the concept of ‘friction’ as a route into exploring these themes, with potential topics for discussion including (but not limited to):
· Data and ethics
· Cultural shifts relating to the capture of data
· The vulnerability of software to hacking and surveillance
· Resistance to surveillance and data harvesting
· Activist uses of data, particularly the circulation of leaked material
· The politics of hacking
· The exploitation of ambiguity in software design by hackers
· Activist and everyday contestations of technological developments
· The sociological and cultural factors required for technologies to ‘work’
· Everyday and/or activist reappropriations of technology
· Tensions between new technologies and existing infrastructures
We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers, including academics from Geography, Business, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Media & Communications: so we welcome a diverse range of perspectives and approaches to this theme.
We encourage interactive presentation formats, and will allocate longer time-slots to workshops to accommodate these, but also have space for shorter 20 minute position papers.
Extended deadline for proposals: 1st March 2014
If you are interested in participating please submit a 250 word proposal for a workshop or paper, along with your name and current email address, to centreforcriticaltheory@gmail.com
Please also feel free to contact us with more general enquiries, follow the Centre for Critical Theory’s Twitter account @criticaltheory
Amongst the books to look out for this year are three translations of books by Bernard Stiegler.
The first to come out, in February, is an interesting collaborative critique of consumer capitalism by members of the Ars Industrialis association, fronted by Stiegler. In The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism, and following the Ars Industrialismanifesto, Stiegler (et al.) argues against the proletarianization of the subject into an unthinking and passive consumer and for the renewal of life skills (savour-vivre) through an ‘industrial populism’.
The second, coming out in April, will be the final volume of the Disbelief and Discredit series, which offers a critique of the effects of the development of industrial technologies on our capacities for rest, considered reflection, leisure, the development of skills and, importantly, care for one another and for society. In the final volume, The Lost Spirit of Capitalism, Stiegler advances his argument for a new ‘industrial spirit’ by fostering a ecology that not only looks after the planet but also renews the exploited energies of human desire. This is another excellent translation by Dan Ross for Polity.
The third, coming out in August, is the first volume of the important series: Symbolic Misery. The Hyperindustrial Epoquewill be the first appearance of Stiegler’s work concerning aesthetics in an extended format and contains some of his critical work concerning cinema. In particular, Stiegler advances his critical articulation of cinema as the industrial temporal object in order to argue that it is the aesthetic experience that can combat the creeping conditioning of experience on its own territory. Again, Dan Ross brings his detailed knowledge of Stiegler’s oeuvre to provide a valuable and timely translation.
Following on from the translation I made of Bernard Stiegler’s reflections on how digital (media) technologies can perform a valuable pedagogical role, I wanted to highlight that Martin Weller has given a very cogent and pointed critique of the fairly common narrative of ‘disruptive technology’ in relation to MOOCs.
This brings together two aspects of my own research: the ways in which those involved in computing R&D look to the future and anticipate the kinds of technologies they may want to produce (and the kinds of politics that produces); and what can be seen as the progressive commoditisation of our capacities to think and feel by certain applications of digital media.
Firstly, as Martin identifies in his blogpost, there is a widespread discourse of the necessity of breakthrough, disruption and revolution in the mythology of the aspirational technology sector located in Silicon Valley. This has some obvious foundations in the need to continually destroy and re-create new markets in a finite global system of capital (as David Harvey cogently diagnoses). It also has an interesting basis in alternative discourses of progress on the counterculture movements in that same region of the US, with Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Network) a significant exponent of libertarian thought in the growing ICT industry that translated into the creation of WIRED magazine as the purveyor of this techno-economic orthodoxy (for more on this see Fred Turner’s brilliant book).
Martin offers the insight that the rather clunky, and somewhat messianic, narrative of the need for an external agent to intervene in a slow, inefficient, outmoded (and so on) sector, central to the disruptive technology spiel, allows sharp and charismatic entrepreneurs to step in as the pseudo-saviour, i.e. Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and others of his ilk. Criticism of the West Coast (capitalist) mythology is not new, of course, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron offered a critique of the ‘Californian Ideology‘ in the 1990s, and Stiegler has criticised the ‘American model’ of laissez faire ‘cultural capitalism’ led by the ‘programming industries’ of new media (“functionally dedicated to marketing and publicity” [p. 5]) in his The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Indeed, we can look back to Adorno and Horkheimer’s stinging critique of the Culture Industryas a formidable progenitor. What we can perhaps take from that line of argument is that arguing for a supposed ‘greater’ choice is actually a deception, the ‘choice’ is merely to consume more.
Others, who set themselves up as more thoughtful commentators have also weighed in on the side of the need for a disruption/revolution. Martin highlights that Clay Shirky has also parroted the, now well-worn, technological deterministic ark of argument. As with others, Shirky suggests that ‘education is broken‘ and must therefore be fixed by shiny new technology, in the form of MOOCs . Some proponents of this line of argument suggest that this would bring wider access to university level learning. There are a few (also well-worn but compelling) critiques of this line.
An obvious initial critique, as Martin argues in his blogpost, is that the ‘education is broken and so it requires a technological fix’ argument has gained so much traction because it is neat and easy to digest by journalists. A simple story with a clear solution is always going to trump the slightly messy, perhaps convoluted, and multiple stories that approximate the truth, for which there are unclear and troubling political solutions that require quite a lot of explanation and working through.
Furthermore, the existing evidence of engagement with MOOCs also somewhat contradicts the rosy picture painted by their evangelists. Completion rates for MOOCs tell a mixed story (as Martin has pointed out in other blogposts) and this perhaps speaks to the negotiation (by both students and course designers/leaders) of legitimacy and value for these courses – this is a sector still very much in flux. Those who are passionate about providing equal and wider access to university level education are torn by the desire to offer courses that open up (frequently excellent) materials for anyone to access but this is, of course, only a fraction of what we as university lecturers and students do when running and participating in courses.
We’re all, of course, increasingly proficient at consuming content online and MOOCs leverage that behaviour. What such systems are not so good at is providing something analogous to tutorials. The stand in for this is peer discussion/ support, which, of course, come with their own social and cultural issues around facilitation and particular participants becoming overbearing etc. So, these (socio-)technological fixes are not necessarily a like-for-like stand-in for all of those significant but hard to define benefits of university study within the physical context of an institution. Which is not to say that whatever MOOCs turn into cannot be of value, its just that its neither a direct alternative nor a replacement but rather a new/emerging form of pedagogical practice.
We can also look to the somewhat obvious Marxian critique of the constant clarion for technological revolution that, far from bringing in egalitarian and widespread access to a better form of living, education and so on, it ushers in the creation of a new proletarianised class of knowledge worker, trained, in this case, by machines (the machine learning version of xMOOCs is the example here) and held even further away from access to critical debate and the means of production.
After all, in a ‘mature’ market for technology, devices (and sometimes services) become cheap through mass production and availability. This slashes profit margins and consumer-users become savvy at backwards engineering and ‘modding’. Customers taking power into their own hands is rather undesirable for the corporate technology producer, unless they can co-opt those developments into the next iteration of the product. Thus, constant ‘innovation’ brings with it the maintenance of a premium for the ‘latest’, ‘must-have’ etc. device/service and necessarily excludes those who cannot pay.
One can easily imagine, then, how a stratification of the market would rapidly take hold. Cheaper, gigantic and formulaic courses (with automated marking of assessments) would be seen as lesser ‘products’ than more exclusive courses (with human tutor support). Those with power and money, in this case, would most-likely still send their children to (very expensive) physical universities with small classes, lots of attention from staff and all of the accoutrements of elite institutions.
Leaving that rather depressing argument aside, the framing of this form of consumer market for higher education is very Anglo-American, where degrees have already become a form of currency – for which there isn’t really an alternative. I cannot help wondering what other forms of education are being ignored (and therefore probably saved). The system of apprenticeship in Germany, for example, where more than half of school-leavers enter apprenticeships, which are really valued in society – with a majority of apprentices staying on with their host companies, is very successful and neither needs or could support a Silicon Valley style ‘disruption’.
Where does this leave us with regard to Stiegler’s argument that it is precisely the forms of collaboration that are opened up by digital media that can and should be used to transform higher education? Well, the innovative media supports being created in the guise of MOOCs and so on are neither the envisioned radical break(through) claimed in the silicon valley rhetoric or a pedagogical nosedive. As with all forms of technicity, MOOCs are pharmacological – they have the capacity to be both ‘poison’ and ‘cure’. If we take seriously Stiegler’s challenge that we need ‘to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions’ then we also need to take (very) seriously Martin’s arguments that designing open education courses/experiences is hard. I’m certainly not going to attempt to offer ‘easy’ or glib answers to such a problem here…
If we want the kind of collaborative learners that Stiegler gestures towards do we simply hope that they are self-selecting? Almost like postgraduate education is, with motivated students seeking out the opportunities to learn and contribute to the production of knowledge. That, of course, is a relatively small minority of the student population. Equally,we might consider the example of the proactive producers of peer-to-peer knowledge using platforms like Wikipedia, who are self-selecting and a minority relative to the number of ‘passive’ users of the platform. If the degree remains the only currency for employability within certain sectors and for particular kinds of roles then we retain the significant tension between the ideals of the pursuit and production of knowledge, traditionally at the heart of higher education, and the purchasing of a passport for employment (often in an unrelated field, probably in the financial sector) which the university degree has become in the UK.
It seems to me that it is not the university side of higher education that is broken in the UK (although it is always worthwhile striving for the ideals that underpin it), instead it is the preparation of skilled employment that was once provided by a valued system of apprenticeships and polytechnic institutions that has been not only broken but decimated. The renewal of these complimentary forms of further and higher education, with the new media supports we are using throughout all areas of life, seems to be an immediate and pressing concern.
Towards the end of last year, Mediapart (a cross between an association for co-learning and an online publisher concerned with digital media) published a blogpost by Bernard Stiegler concerning the role of digital technologies in the ongoing transformation of the university. This line of argument will be familiar to those that follow Stiegler’s work (especially if you read French) and if you have read some of the short pieces by Stiegler that I have previously translated concerning MOOCs and participatory education. What is heartening, especially if you are already in the open education conversation, and are a wee bit cynical about the hyperbole surrounding MOOCs, is that Stiegler argues for a debate around how to foster and open out education, not how to monetize it. As ever, the fundamental (pharmacological) relationship between ‘human’ and ‘technology’ is at the heart of the issue for Stiegler. As he argues in the final paragraph:
The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context.
Again, an argument that thoughtful practitioners of ‘open education’, like Martin Weller, will be very familiar with.
The sharp-eyed reader will pick up something else from this article too. The Institute for Research Innovation (part of the Pomipdou Centre in Paris), directed by Stiegler, are now using their online tools for collaboration ‘in the wild’. So, the vidéolivre that Stiegler points us to, towards the end, is more sophisticated than the embedded YouTube video and is a kind of online mini-course (unfortunately, only in French) hosted on the Digital Studies website (on which you can read the ‘call for Digital Studies‘ in English). Another interesting tool mentioned is Polemic Tweets: a kind of add-on to twitter through the use of basic syntax (much like RT, MT, etc.) in order to amplify, disagree with or question things (see the explanation in English here). For example, you can see the use of these tags in combination with the documentation of a recent conference Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel[#ENMI13] (something like: ‘Investigations into the New Industrial World‘), where there is a recording of the video stream with annotations that temporally synchronise tweets (with the hashtag and ‘polemic’ syntax) in a timeline below – worth a look, here.
This starts to get at some of the pedagogical tools Stiegler and IRI are offering as a means of beginning to think about what it might mean to ‘rethink knowledge and its relationship with its media/supports’ within the domain of (open) education. It is in this context that one might read the article that follows…
As usual, original French and clarifications are in square brackets. I am indebted to Patrick Crogan (former colleague, translator of some of Stiegler’s work, and a speaker at the conference mentioned above) for his proof-reading.
The digital constitutes a new épistémè: it is the very nature of knowledge in all its forms that will be affected. This technology will function for our epoque in the same way that writing did for antiquity (and it is in this way that we can say that it put antiquity into decline). This was suggested thirty years ago in The Computerisation of Society:
“From the moment that Sumerians wrote the first hieroglyphs on wax tablets, they embodied, probably without realising, a decisive mutation of humanity: the appearance of writing. Yet, it was this that changed the world.”
It is inconceivable that universities and large research organisations do not have at their core of their concerns and the top of their priorities the digital transformation of knowledge: the deployment in all disciplines, as in all dimensions of human existence, of what Clarisse Herrenschmidt has called reticular writing clearly constitutes the major challenge for 21st century knowledge.
As for online university courses, they have become at Harvard small private online courses, which has led Robert Lue to suggest that “we are already in the post-MOOC era“. This statement testifies to the fact that the transformations at the sidelines of education are the visible effects of the mnemotechnical milieu of knowledge, which is in the process of changing its nature, is upsetting [bouleverse] knowledge itself, from research all the way through to the most elementary aspects of education.
Whether we consider these issues from massive open online courses, small private online courses [both in English in original], or the many other already existing or possible models of digital education they all constitute a major issue. But this issue logically comes after research and digital studies–which the Minister, and the National Research Agency under his purview, have furthermore adopted in their agenda under the name of ‘digital studies’ without which this could have remained unnoticed.
It is only possible to implement new forms of education related to the development of digital technologies and to experience them collectively on the condition that they are designed and practiced in a close and explicit relation with a policy for researching the deeper layers of epistemic becoming and the new disciplinary epistemologies required by digitisation. Without such a structured and openly acknowledged connection, the initiatives taken in all areas alongside [established] education can only emerge as superficial fashions and effects, subject as ever to all of the ebbs and flows of media excitement in the contemporary world: they always seem to belong to an age that has already been superceded by the lastest novelty in an area where there is no lack of imagination–sometimes at the risk of lacking reflection, if not knowledge.
The university appeared a little over one thousand years ago, conditioned then by the copying of canonical texts, which led to the interpretation that is engendered in the process of copying, which experienced a second era with the republic of letters created by the printing press, which originated in the university of Berlin, and which lasted until the 20th century.
In 1993 the university entered a new age, with the arrival of the web making reticular writing accessible to all. It is this important, if not massive and amazing, fact that necessitates the development of digital studies. Whatever its form, knowledge is a form of memory shared by a community, according to the rules practised, and sometimes explicated and theorised, by that community: which is thus, in general, a community of peers. These scientific and critical knowledges appeared with alphabetic writing, which, in all its forms, creates a mnemotechnical and techno-logical milieu that conditions [conditionne] the development and transmission of knowledge based in peer review.
Neither for knowledge in general or scholarly institutions in particular, are the written alphabet, the printed word, data, algorithms and digital networks simple mediums of education or research: these are the domains [milieux] of knowledge in which is founded the open and constant criticism of the rules of interpretation in which the knowledge formed by these communities of peers consists.
The digital deeply transforms such forms of knowledge principally because it constitutes a new means of recording [surface d’inscription] and publicly formalising the debate between peers by which all rational disciplines are constituted, through conflicting interpretation and scientific controversy. The characteristics of the digital (automation, speed of calculation, vast planetary access, cooperative networks, new processes of formalisation, new models, visualisations, interactions and simulations etc.) constitute new possibilities for knowledge, for significantly widening accessibility to more diverse audiences, which will redefine the conditions for equal access to knowledge [qui redéfinissent les conditions de la parité], which also involves the requirements for certification as a form of legitimation.
Peer-to-peer, which is increasingly discussed since the advent of software and websites described as P2P, appeared over 27 centuries ago with the first land surveyors [géomètres]. This is why amongst the announcements made by the minister for higher education and research, the most significant was the support for research into the impacts and opportunities of the digital in the development of knowledge as a form of emancipation [comme de telles parités est la plus significative]. The digital mnemotechnical milieu makes possible and requires new heuristics, new hermeneutics, and new epistemologies which must foster teaching and pedagogies in which the purpose is precisely the enrolment of the maximum number of students into these communities of peers.
From the infinitely big (astrophysics) to the infintetly small (nanoscience), physics is reconfigured by digital instrumentation through mathematics and statistics notably in the guise of “big data“. Linguistics is under the effect of what Frédéric Kaplan has called linguistic capitalism. Geography is in the era of geographical information systems and GPS, through which territory becomes functionally and normatively digital. Genetic biology that made possible computerised biostations, etc. No form of knowledge escapes the new demands [nouvelle facture] of the contemporary mnemotechnical milieu configured by the categorisation machines that are networked computers.
This digital categorisation totally redefines the conditions of production of the rules of categorisation, which form the foundation for what is ultimately knowledge produced through peer review: this is a fundamental point that it is not possible for me to develop here, and it is for this reason that the reader can consult a short interactive video [vidéolivre] which has been prepared to complete this article, and which focuses more extensively on these concerns in order to illustrate how the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI), which I run, designs and practices investigations of these issues.
This interactive video–designed to become a social book [in English in original], by which I mean a support for a network of readers constituted as a community of plural interpretations-is one example amongst many (such as polemic tweets, also developed IRI and implemented by Mediapart in the recently organised debate about the rise of the National Front), which are all new forms of editorial media that have emerged since the arrival of the web.
These digital media will become new apparatuses [dispositifs] of public debate which always come from university learning, and with which it is essential to enrol and involve the students as much as possible. For over a thousand years, universities and research activities as well as the teaching thereby developed were made possible originally by manuscripts and then by printed books. Which is why a thesis, regardless of the discipline in which it is submitted, is always presented as a book. This situation will fundamentally change in the course of the coming years. This does not signal the disappearance of the book: it means that, like the knowledge they carry, they will transform.
New conditions of publication, disputation [confrontation], certification and editorialisation of knowledge are coming into place. They correspond to new regulations and new methods for heuristics, interpretation, teaching and pedagogy, which are arising, forming and capturing the 21st century épistémè. This is taking place through a dynamic process that the public authorities should strongly encourage, pushing academic institutions, industry and the markets to cooperate in the production of a long-term vision–which must be a vision of the role of France in Europe in the 21st century.
The question is not whether or not we should develop MOOCs in France (it is obviously necessary): it is to drive a dynamic for the rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and its media [supports] (of which MOOCs are a possible dimension) with the universities and academic institutions, and which, through research, will redefine their role in this new context. This is a good question for which it is not only healthy but essential that a public debate is held–providing that the grounds for that debate are not the claim that everything should be left to the market nor the denial of the very need for such a debate.
Bernard Stiegler has recorded a set of two pieces concerning the ‘digital revolution’ for Le Monde: for their Laws of the Networks[Lois des réseaux] blog, convened by the journalist Dominique Lacroix.
In the first of the two pieces, Stiegler articulates the ‘pharmacological’ nature of the internet, the ways in which our use of the digital both opens up new ways of living and, at the same time, constitutes great risks to our collective and, importantly, mental individuation. In particular, Stiegler focuses on understandings of the public and the private, in the wake of the revelations made possible by Edward Snowden’s ‘leaks’, and the ways in which the digital unsettles and unbalances what we can understand to be private or ‘secret’.
I have translated this first instalment, below. As usual clarifications or questions over the translation of a particular word are in square brackets and all emphasis is in the original text. The notes at the end are also from the original piece.
The Net blues [le blues du Net]
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler defines the digital revolution through the idea of publication and its social significance. The internet and the web bring incredible and unprecedented potential. However this process has become a target for the big American corporations which represent a risk for our societies. Bernard Stiegler brings together the Greek Myths and the work of historian of Greek myths Jean-Pierre Bernant, to clarify the issues of the Snowden affair.
Net blues
The digital revolution truly began a little over twenty years ago, when the United States enabled the internet to be accessible through the web. They appropriated a vision, formed by the European Tim Berners-Lee, and made it an apparatus of neo-colonialism. It was a deliberate strategy for at least five years and which has significantly transformed the face of the world. We have not fully understood, by the way, and I’m not certain we will ever truly comprehend, this extremely complex (always) ongoing process that has a global spread.
The digital is above all a process of generalised formalisation. This process, which resides in the protocols that enable interoperability, makes a range of diverse and varied techniques. This is a process of unification through binary code of norms and procedures that today allow the formalisation of almost everything: traveling in my car with a GPS system, I am connected through a digitised triangulation process that formalises my relationship with the maps through which I navigate and that transform my relationship with territory. My relationships with space, mobility and my vehicle are totally transformed. My inter-individual, social, familial, scholarly, national, commercial and scientific relationships are all literally unsettled by the technologies of social engineering. It is at once money and many other things – in particular all scientific practices and the diverse forms of pulbic life.
This has become what I have called – taking an expression of Sylvain Auroux – the process of “grammatisation”. Drawing on recent work, I ask if this process – as André Leroi-Gourhan has already suggested – triggered the Upper Paleolithic, then suddenly intensified in the event of the neolithic, resulted in ideogrammatic writing. This has been rendered more complex, and enriched, via the automata of Vaucanson; then through the automation of factories, and thus the operation of machinery: and finally to the present situation, which is digital.
Le canard digérateur, one of the most sophisticated automatons by Jacques Vaucanson, French engineer (1709-1782). source Wikipedia
The word “grammatisation” coming from τα γÏάμματα (ta grammata, Ed.), which can be called “the letters” in greek. This makes possible the ‘discretisation” of the flow of the temporal continuum, in the form of words, and this discretisation is effectuated through a spatialisation that is also a graphical reproduction, in other words a visualisation.
Today, the digital permits the discretisation not only of the movements of the mouth and tongue, which provide words, but rather all movements, both human and non-human – for example the movement of beef carcases that cross the Atlantic on cargo ships from Argentina to feed Europeans, which carry RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, and which create what today we call traceability. Other examples include: how we follow the movements of animals and insects to attempt to understand the transformative processes of life, of the earth, and of other ecosystems extraordinarily perturbed by human and industrial activity, which we call the “anthropization” of the world. Yet the digital equally facilitates user profiling–and thus from this facilitates a control of behaviour through social mimesis–to track all human actions and gestures and to apply mathematical correlations with feedback loops to institute what Antoinette Rouvray and Thomas Berns [1] describe as “algorithmic governmentality”, which represents an automated forecasting of both private and public life. Or, again, the discretisation of the movements in the brain, such as brain imaging and the use of such descritisation processes to aid neuromarketing, based in an analysis of the brain that tends to directly solicit automated drives that short-circuit social development [apprentissages].
All of this opens, at the same time, tremendous new and extremely promising opportunities in social relations, in forms of knowledge, in cooperation in all forms, in communities of peer contributors, in the economy of contribution, in new tools for research, in education and creativity and finally in a new age of the life of the spirit. This speaks to a process underwritten with huge contrast and contradictions. I believe that there is a lot less time left than human society, and in particular European society, realises. Unfortunately, in Europe, this realisation was exceedingly late.
The case of Snowden, considered as a whistleblower in Europe and a traiter in the US, has revealed the practices of NSA (National Security Agency) with the collusion of Facebook, Google and other American organisations, informing the US intelligence agencies of all of our activities, through a generalised traceability. Faced with these developments, but also with the growing feeling that it is is less and less tolerable that there is a hegemony of commercial objectives that have no political or social regulation and which are almost exclusively conducted in California, by hackers, the militant developers of the web, the internet and computing and digital technologies in all sectors–which I have been personally using for over 30 years- a large number of proselytisers of the “digital revolution” have been hit by what I have called, during a public talk for Ars Industrialis at the Théatre du Rond Pont: the “Net blues” [2].
These activities and these communities suddenly [tout à coup] discovered that the internet has extremely toxic aspects. For example, because we have seen what Snowdon revealed we have discovered the very possibility of secrecy seems to have disappeared with the digitisation of everyday life. This dissolution of secrecy is very serious. On a psychical level, it is perhaps the destruction of the possibility of a psyche endowed with intimacy and of singular individuation, if it is the case that the unconscious is what remains hidden and secret to oneself. And at the level of diplomacy, the publication of the diplomatic data and cables by Wikileaks – through a channeling [pompage] of data that made the internet possible – which has been presented as a positive thing, is also literally the destruction of the conditions for classic diplomacy, which is to say [de ce qui sert parfois à éviter la guerre]. For me, the publication of the diplomatic cables without doubt includes a positive dimension, but it is absolutely necessary not to elide that it is also a dangerous shift.
That secrets are necessary for international life is obvious. However, for example, is banking secrecy necessary? This is another topic for which we do not have time to discuss, but many believe (including myself) that the automated transfer of information to prevent bank secrecy should be mandatory.
Be that as it may, the secrecy of intimate life is essential and forms the possibility of attaining a dignity of existence–a dignity defined for humanity by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The traceablity of personal data creates a kind of digital nudity which is an indignity for the human [l’homme]. Initimacy is the possibility and the necessity of having a secret life that I compose for myself. This is the primary lesson from Freud. I do not truly know for myself what is extremely intimate to me because that is what we call the unconscious. In the guise of self-expression, the whole of human history is in some way a “keeping of secrets” without making them public and without ever totally having access to them ourselves.
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myths and thinking with the Greeks
From the advent of the politeia this becomes a fundamental aspect of social organsiation. The Greeks played an extremely important role in the precise, delineated and institutionalised differentation between the public and the private, for we cannot have a public sphere without a private sphere. To understand this, one must read the text that Jean-Pierre Vernant dedicated to the relation between the couple Hermes and Hestia, Hestia is the figure of the home, privacy, secrecy and the care given to the fire that always comprises a sacred and divine dimension. Hermes is the figure of movement, communication and public space. Vernant shows that there is not one without the other: if we destroy what is secret, we also destroy public space, and vice versa.
As for us, the men and women of the 21st century, we are experiencing a publishing revolution: the digital space constitutes, above all, a process of publishing. We publish ourselves, voluntarily or not. We do it unintentionally when we are tracked by cookies: everything that we do is parsed, storable and analysable through so-called big data, which are new ways of implementing applied mathematics through algorithms which can capture and process the hundreds and billions of [units of] data, which, through feedback loops, performatively change the dynamics of the behaviour of those whose data are analysed in real-time, and which constantly formulate adjustments to trajectories which are in reality a kind of autopilot for behaviour.
Be that as it may, through these publishing systems, we are all capable of publishing and so distributing our ideas, our propositions, our analyses, our points of view, our critiques, and so on – and through this, we become able to take part in a new form of public life, for example by creating [web] sites, like that of Ars Industrialis, and thereby constituting the new possiblities, which Gilbert Simondon called pyschic and collective individuation. I use the word “individuation” to explicate the “pharmacological” character of the internet: the internet is double-edged, it offers new and absolutely extraordinary opportunities for individation but also, at the same time, it threatens the fundamentals of individuation.
The internet is a “φάÏμακον” (pharmakon Ed.), in the sense that Plato described writing, and we are discovering this double-edged nature [cette double face]. The actual system of the web is dangerous for secrets, for psychic individuation, for collective individuation, because we cannot and we should not submit to forms of calculability. Such a capitulation [soumission] can only engender a “voluntary servitude” which could rapidly become involuntary and inescapable [insurmontable]. In contrast, the digital allows the intensification of the incalculable in the same way that writing in Ancient Greece had huge effects on individuation through an enriched social diversity – especially by making citizenship possible, which formed the birth of a new process of psychic and collective individuation.
The promulgation of writing has certainly engendered a loss of idiomatic differences, that is to say, local individuations. All kinds of idioms began to disappear. At the same time, it was a growth in individuation through citizenship, tragedy, philosophy, etc. – All on the basis of public law [rights? droit public].
The question for us is whether the switch to digital is creating a phenomenon of this kind or, conversely, a process of widespread “disindividuation.”
Bernard Stiegler’s office, Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, 28 juillet 2013, taken by Dom Lecroix.
Notes
1. Cf. Réseaux, février 2013, La Découverte.
2. Cf. http://www.arsindustrialis.org/
3. I speak here of performativity in the sense of John Austin, for whom a performative utterance is a self-declaration such as that which I say, by the fact that I am saying it, creates a situation, and this “fact” is something in the situation that is prior to the creation of the situation. Cf. John Austin, Quand dire, c’est faire, éditions Seuil.
Dan Ross, Author of Violent Democracy and Director of the phenomenal film The Isterand translator of several of Bernard Stiegler’s books, has been tweeting some snippets from Stiegler’s recent book États de choc and from his 2013 lectures at Goldsmiths. I have concatenated the split quote and reproduced it here, as an aide de memoire as much as anything…
First, from États de choc:
“Catherine Malabou makes plasticity Hegel’s major concept. But plasticity is possible only by passing through its solidifying and fixing exteriorization. Plasticity is possible only by passing through the fixing that is writing, without which there can be no reading. By passing through writing, which is a specific moment of technics-become-grammatization process. Hegelian, or post-Hegelian, plasticity is CONSTITUTED (and destituted) by its ‘inorganic moment’, as Hegel says.” Bernard Stiegler, États de choc, pp. 189–90, note 2.
Second, Dan’s précis of a key point from Stiegler’s Goldsmiths lectures:
Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths 2013, disagreeing with Catherine Malabou’s “no justification for separating mind and brain”. Malabou’s discourse completely ignores the fact that knowledge is not simply cognitive. Knowledge presupposes social circuits of transindividuation through which a form of knowledge is constituted. Malabou’s discourse is regressive in relation to what Freud taught us, that libido is irreducible to the drives. What Catherine Malabou ignores is that the brain harbors drive-based automatisms or compulsions. These automatisms or compulsions can become object investments of desires and idealizations. But they can do so only because the non-organic recoding of the cerebral organ meant that the instincts were replaced with the drives, thereby becoming (thanks to this recoding) educable.
